Morgan Loomis

I finally got around to publishing two new tools, ml_convertRotationOrder, and ml_lockAndHideAttributes. They’re pretty straightforward, nothing too fancy, but I’ve found they can be useful to have wrapped up like this. Head over to the tools page if you’d like to check them out.

ml_convertRotationOrder.py is for changing the rotation order of an object that has already been animated. Sometimes you start animation without considering the rotation order, or the needs of the animation changes and you realize a different rotation order would be better. One way to preserve your animation is to bake it out to locators, but this tools goes through and uses the xform command to change the rotation order on each keyframe without affecting the orientation. It’s a faster and more accurate process.

ml_lockAndHideAttributes.py also does pretty much just what it says. It’s a wrapper for quickly being able to lock and/or hide attributes by selecting them in the channel box, and then unlocking and unhiding attributes without having to open the obnoxious channel control window. Unhiding will show all default and user defined attributes on a node. I have these commands set as hotkeys, which makes it easy to troubleshoot rigs when you need to quickly look at hidden attributes or move locked nodes. You can create hotkeys easily by right-clicking on the buttons in the UI.